Drifting House (20 page)

The ­fortune-teller, the closest thing Mrs. Lim has to a friend that late spring, sniffs her as soon as she enters. Smelling the bowl of ­home-brewed, milky
makgeolli
that Mrs. Lim consumed before arriving, she says, Mrs. Lim, you’ve been drinking.

Mrs. Lim digs into her tumultuous purse, sprays herself with a vial of lilac. She says, How can I not drink when I’m afraid of my dreams? Each night she imagines what must be her man’s toothless jaw trying to speak from under Vietnam’s jungle. The rusted clutch of some booby trap around his feet. The gobbets of his brave flesh stuck in camphor trees. He was a good man, and she had imagined another life for them, another country. Now she fears her family’s bad luck is following her; she has had fortune with her dreams.

The old woman squints, and knits her painted eyebrows together. She mumbles, War after war after war. They’re bleeding our continent. She fumbles with her book of numbers and reconfirms Mrs. Lim’s time of birth, day, month, year. When she opens her mouth to speak, Mrs. Lim says, I never wanted to go back to the family farm; I wanted to be somebody. And now it’s the end of love, the end of guarantees. She raises her enameled nails beseechingly. So don’t deny me. Still, after several apologies, all the ­fortune-teller claims to see in the numbers is the ruins of time. A time of money and of speed, though men and women dare not hold hands in public, a time when people do not ask audaciously what is happiness. She says churches will protect the dead and the living, the country’s people will rise and be crushed by the government, and time will swallow up Mrs. Lim’s beauty.

The government’s swallowed up my son! Mrs. Jang shouts at the neighbors. She has taken to standing at the street corner, railing at passing pedestrians. Her ­nineteen-year-old son has disappeared; tears the size of salmon eggs squeeze out of her eyes as she curses the government. Her diffident husband, afraid that she, too, will be arrested, pulls timidly at the flaps of her sleeve.

Give me back my son, she says, and lifts her husband up by his shirt. She stands outside until her shoes are worn away by June’s monsoon rains. As the fierce summer heat sets in, her wringing hands become leathery in the sun. Her dark hair turns hoary white out of grief, her brown eyes fade to gray. Mina, Hana, and the other kids in the neighborhood slow down, listening, as they pass her on the way home from school. Sometimes they bring her a few rice cakes or a bowl of leftover rice porridge from home, as their mothers instruct them to. To the curious children, the only ones unafraid of her grief, Mrs. Jang relays her story of how the ­black-suited men took her son away because he had been seen handing out political pamphlets.

Which of you reported him? she demands.

I didn’t report him, Hana says, so upset by Mrs. Jang’s tale that she shivers in the white heat. I promise.

Everything he said is true, Mrs. Jang says, as her anxious husband tries to pull her back into the house. You’ve made him disappear for telling the truth.

Across the street corner from where Mrs. Jang spends most of her days, the ­mini-mart keeper washes dishes and sweeps for his wife,
gives her back rubs, and makes all the women envious. While Hana hides in the aisles, Mina watches Junho, a boy in their third grade class, fishtailing across the ­mini-mart floor. His face is ecstatic, a fleshy plum. Mina barricades herself behind an aisle of shrimp chips and bags of rice crackers as tall as her, her large eyes lit like tinder, her grip a tourniquet around a tin of tuna. Someday, she vows, she will resist Japanese colonists, fight in wars, come back a war hero, be equal to the boys.

Mina, here I am! Hana’s voice calls from behind packets of dried cuttlefish, as Junho heaves like the rough East Sea, rubs his body up and down against the blackened tiles. It is the first time Mina has ever seen him smile.

When their parents have completed the honor rituals to their ancestors and are sleeping off the Lunar New Year’s feast, the neighborhood’s children try to catch the moon. One of their fathers said that the Americans have learned to walk on its cratered surface, so they are determined that at least the Koreans will be the first ones to catch it. Hana will buy the successful boy or girl coveted ­silver-foiled Hershey’s chocolates off the black market; Mina has promised a kiss to the victor. The moon looks so close. It seems entirely possible.

Boys take turns releasing the swing and gliding as high as they can. Girls jump from the top of the gleaming slide and fling a fishing net into the sky. Still, the universe is too large, and they land, dusty and defeated in the sand. Within an hour the seven of them line up on the chilly bench, somber with disappointment. Junho, the oldest by three months, says, I knew it was impossible.
The youngest at seven, a girl so poor she was once caught eating leftovers from a garbage can, begins to cry. She casts a fistful of sand at him, and makes the sky cloudy for a moment.

Mina kisses the girl. Of course it’s possible! she says. Here it is! And pulls the net over Hana’s solemn ­moon-shaped face.

Mrs. Lim is convinced that the moon looks more beautiful in other countries. Look, she says. Look how ugly our moon is. And as she holds Mina up, she makes her daughter reflect on its dishwater color, its streaky gray surfaces.

While Mrs. Lim searches for a new moon with the ­green-eyed man, Mina tells a story. Though the outdoor toilets used by the tenants smell like winter’s roasted chestnuts and ammonia, the number of children grows in the neighborhood’s ­kitchen-size playground.

Mina stands on a plastic horse, her feet sway in the pink stirrups. The kids facing her sit on one another’s laps, on the swings and slide, expectant. Jungsu, who tries to touch everyone’s butt while laughing; Eunhee, a girl with no eyebrows and skin so pale it looks bleached; Gyeongjin, a boy who once tried to share a chicken bone in his mouth as a gesture of love; a gaggle of older girls who like to braid Mina’s hair and dress her up in their outgrown clothes; and others. The only one absent is the one that matters most to Mina: Hana, locked up on a Saturday afternoon at an abacus class, with her brothers.

Mina waves her wand, her mother’s bamboo spatula. The
wind bites her nose and ears red, lifts her hair, and transforms her into a witch. She waves her wand again and casts her enchantments.

The audience is listening; she is ready to begin.

It is there, it is real, when Mina promenades across the playground, her head high. They see Mrs. Lim with rose of Sharon growing in her hair, from her shirt, from her very toes. The girls lean forward, entranced as Mina walks delicately across the pit of sand.

Where are you going? they ask.

To Texas, of course! she says, naming her father’s hometown, where he had promised they would live someday after Nam.

Why Texas, they say, when our country’s the best in the world?

Over there, she says, now curled up in the woolen lap of an older girl, houses are built for giants, and families use ­walkie-talkies to talk to each other. One cow is big enough to feed the whole Korean army. And there’s never any winter!

A few more minutes of this, and the children are convinced that Texas is where they want to be. But when they ask her how she knows so much about America, Mina remembers that she is supposed to keep her father a secret, which angers her. She begins to act out the way her father will escort her mother back to the neighborhood that evening. There will be, she promises, a ­red-and-green palanquin with silk ornaments dangling from its four corners. The kids are breathless, their eyes straining to see this man that no one knows anything about.